Why do you think this is an issue now in 2009?
This is old news.
The NSA has had acres of supercomputers stashed underground at their facilities in Ft. Meade
for decades, and they take everything from the huge Internet backbone pipes coming into the
country, and through the country. Ergo, all ISP transmissions are sucked up in the deluge.
Not only Internet, but email, SMS texting, cell phone calls, landline calls - everything.
Read Puzzle Palace and the other books by James Bamford. Public knowledge. They store
everything and the amount of info they have is staggering.
i can agree with most of what you said, except the part that the "store everything"
that would be such a massive database of info that it would be impossible to store it
and, it would be a massive waste of resources to even try
now might they store SOME of it? no doubt
and yes, i'm sure the amount that they do store would be staggering, but to store all the data that crosses the internet and phone services would not be possible
you would be talking terabytes hourly